New Adwords Quality Score Bot Aims To Nuke Arbitragers

Its been no secret that Google has been working on launching a new quality score bot. I have read threads about it on pretty much every forum. I have also been getting tons of emails about the subject asking me what I think is going to happen.

I talked to a close (anonymous) friend inside Adwords and she tells me the big changes are purely targeted at the arbitragers. This really again should come as no shock. She was super vague on specifics but did tell me that they were fingerprinting (my word) links and text on page that would indicate the page was a landing for contextual search arbitrage or cost per action arbitrage. For those in Rio Linda that means if your running a landing page and directly linking with your affiliate link or running a scraper with nothing but Yahoo/Google ads then YOUR IN TROUBLE!

People inside Microsoft AdCenter ( btw <3 u guys @ adcenter ) also told me a while back that they had finger printed affiliate links and were going to start penalizing (denying or making you pay more) those that were doing that.

Soooo what does all this mean? MASK YOUR LINKS.

If you have a landing page for products for science sake (anyone watch southpark in the last 2 weeks will get that joke) DO NOT directly link with your affiliate code. Make sure you have your own internal redirection system.

For instance if I was paying for Google Adwords to goto shoemoney.com and on shoemoney.com I had offers for RING TONES with AzoogleAds.

Ohh and for those of you doing contextual arbitrage…. unless your cloaking your content prepare for impact.

Keep in mind Google is not going to stop letting you do this… They are just going to charge you more cause of your “quality score”. There is just to much money to be made right now in arbitrage and Google wants a bigger slice.

84 Comments

flip

eeeeek i need to update my links

November 9, 2006

Jeff

This is going to be very interesting to watch. For a while I was thinking that it wasn’t in Google’s interest to pursue click-flippers because of the revenue that it brought to Google. Now, I’m really curious to see how this is going to affect all the folks who have been so go-nuts about click flipping.

I’ll make the popcorn. This should be good.

November 9, 2006

Caydel

Grrr… more bad news

November 9, 2006

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November 9, 2006

Paul

Google’s answer to The Great Question is not my answer.

November 9, 2006

Jeremy Luebke

I’ve been watching GoogleBot and they are actually ignoring robots.txt at times. They will crawl, just not put in the public index. So just because you use robots.txt like that, doesn’t mean they won’t find the links.

I would instead use a form of link cloaking mixed with the redirection. So your redirect link will look at the ip, useragent, and whether the browser accepts cookies. If the IP or user gent show google or the user doesn’t accept cookies (does gbot accept cookies these days?), have that redirect go to a standard domain.com url without the affiliate links. If it looks like a real user, then throw them the affiliate link.

I would still use the robots.txt, but don’t count on that to work all the time.

mad4

Jeremy Luebke

Shoe, are you talking about people buying adwords for arbitrage or people running adsense who’s traffic comes from elsewhere?

November 9, 2006

aeiouy

Science H. Logic that is good advice.

November 9, 2006

ShoeMoney

haha nice Paul

November 9, 2006

ShoeMoney

SOLID!

November 9, 2006

ShoeMoney

This is about people who are spending money on adwords to make money on contextual or affiliate pages.

November 9, 2006

ShoeMoney

They are not going to block them…. Just charge them more 😉

There is just to much money to be made right now in arbitrage and google wants a bigger piece.

November 9, 2006

Ben Wood

I’m a complete noob to all of this, but sounds like what you describe might be good business practice too – cart.php would keep track of all of affiliate link clickthroughs so you can do an audit at the end of the month.

November 9, 2006

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November 9, 2006

Michael

Hi – Just got done reading your posts here, and the comments. I have a question I am hoping someone can answer – Can someone define for me what you mean by “contextual arbitrage”?

I understand the concept itself – buying adwords ads and pointing the customer to another page with adsense ads. I guess what I am trying to understand is – if your page has very relevant content, meets the TOS, and has everything google expects or wants to see, like at least one outbound link – are they going to have a problem with this? Can someone please elaborate?

Thanks,
Michael

November 9, 2006

JB4375

Thanks Shoemoney! Great info as always.

Question: If you had to pick a method of cloaking without php what method would use?

ShoeMoney

Josh

Will this affect iframe usage? I.e. I send clicks to my page, that has some nice cloakced SE content, but then just iframes the add link so the user can see it. Will that be bad or no?

November 9, 2006

ShoeMoney

You should be ok I would think… I guess you would have to tell us. If your cloaking for googlebot(s) not showing them the framed content then you should be ok.

November 9, 2006

Chad

Shoe, are there any negative implications to using a free service like TinyURL?

Thanks

November 9, 2006

Nick Denoo

thx jeremy

November 9, 2006

Tom

Thanks Shoe. After years of blogging I am just now setting up a keyword campaign for arbitrage.

This advice will help a great deal!

November 9, 2006

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November 9, 2006

Derek

you could even go a step further I guess and cloak the link so the google bot sees a fatty content page.. iplists.com

November 9, 2006

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November 9, 2006

Anteros

It seems that there are far more ways to cloak arbitrage than to battle against it. =)

November 9, 2006

David Temple

I thought Google should get rid of this ads for ads program because it does not serve the end user. But it just makes too much money so you hit the nail on the head when you said, “They are not going to block them…. Just charge them more”. Thank goodness their motto is don’t be evil and not don’t be greedy. But isn’t greedy, evil?

November 9, 2006

dean

Do I still have to disallow any directories or files in robot.txt if I mask my affiliate links using .htaccess?

November 9, 2006

ShoeMoney

That is a good questions chad. but I think that tiny url is a 301 redirect which technically if they followed it would show the same… still better then straight affiliate links

November 9, 2006

ShoeMoney

pertaining to this post you would only want to disallow your “jumpscript” if you will. If your using .htaccess then your sending a 301 redirect which for linking purposes might get you in trouble… but again better then linking directly.

November 9, 2006

ShoeMoney

hmm adsense is like 90% of googles PROFIT. they are not going to abandon there cash cow 😉 Would you ?

November 9, 2006

Ringtoneguy

If my site already has a low landing page quality score, can I rework the the page to increase the score? Do I need to scrap the domain and go with a new URL?

November 9, 2006

Alan@HealthyDietPodcast

Google adwords just totally SUCKS! I’ve been running a campaign for months now and just a couple of days ago I added a few words to it and, boom, they started upping my bid prices by 50% to 100%. I must have tripped some filter because I’ve been running this campaign for more than 6 months. I can’t even get them to answer my emails. Google is evil!

November 9, 2006

Josh

Just to be safe, I’ve hidden my links (.htaccess). I’ll let you know how the landing page takes the hit (if it does at all, 0 effect so far).

November 9, 2006

Chad

Shoe, I hope you don’t me posting this here but here’s a free script from Hotscripts that masks links using PHP with a click counter and admin panel. I’ve got it up and running now and it’s working nicely. Links are in the form of ‘click.php?id=45’

ShoeMoney

thats a good question… I think I would first try a new domain and see how it went. If all else fails new adwords account.

November 10, 2006

ShoeMoney

you cant mask adsense links… see cloaking

November 10, 2006

marcowitsch

I would not suggest cloaking and no use of the robots.txt for declining access to the specific files, as long as it looks for G like you have your affiliate links on another page than your landingpage you’re OK! Best is, if your affiliate links are far, far away from your original landing, i dont hide anything from google nor do i make use of robots.txt or some other methods and my average cpc got lowered after the recent algo change, even my rankings are better than before and my overall traffic has increased =)

November 10, 2006

dean

What if I am not doing a 301 redirect just temp redirect. Do you recommend doing it your way with that “jumpscript”. If so why? Thanks shoemoney!

November 10, 2006

GRex

I’m a noob here, but does this apply to adwords that link straight to affiliate page (without landing page)?

josh

Does google honestly expect people to pay for PPC and provide free “informative” site that is not commercial or who’s sole purpose is to sell something? LoL

They will never remove commercial sites that sell products, it’s just a nature of the game, especially that yahoo and msn are catching up.

November 10, 2006

mello

I have been hearing about $10 min bids in Adwords for some time now, but it had not affected me. Not sooner did I read this article, watch a few eps of this seasons LOST, did I see a bunch of $10 bids. LOL. Sheeeet. cart.php sounds about right to me.

November 10, 2006

Theo

Thanks for the info, Shoe..

November 11, 2006

Ron Wilson

Thanks for the advice. I have made the changes.

November 11, 2006

Dan Abbamont

The term “CPA Arbitrage” is a little bit frustrating. It basically says that affiliates in general really aren’t welcome to advertise. Of course, I can get behind that from a user experience standpoint, but it’s just so hard to let go!

Of course, it’s out of situations like this that opportunities for crafty people often arise!

November 11, 2006

Jack

If I am using a clickbank affiliate link page, can the google bot crawl through that to see that the affiliate page has sufficient content on the page to make it have a quality score?

November 11, 2006

Dennis

If you have $10 ads you have been “slapped” becasue of low QS or poor click through rates. It can also happen if several affiliates use direct links. Or maybe Google just doesn’t like you!

Good Luck!

November 11, 2006

Mattboy

i always thought the purpose of adwords was to purchase advertising in order to sell a product, why should an affiliate be discriminated against. What the hell does Google want Adwords to be used for.

November 11, 2006

aeiouy

The losing battle that Google and other SE’s will have is the affiliate marketing model is not going away. As Shoe noted in another entry, it is a beautiful dynamic for the businesses because they have fixed marketing costs. So they are not going to stop doing it, and risk the ups and downs of only running their own campaigns. So some middle ground is going to have to exist where affiliates can continue to succesful market on the search engines.

November 12, 2006

Art

Some people should consider taking off conversion tracking – If Google’s going to price gouge us, there’s no reason to make it any easier on them in determining who’s doing well with AdWords.

I suppose if anyone plans on cloaking, consider sending your affiliate links to somewhere offsite for the redirection decision to made.

November 12, 2006

Luke

Who didn’t see this coming? :p

November 12, 2006

WMFieds

I wonder why Google is concerning themselves with how users utilize Adwords to monetize their marketing efforts. Adwords have already become an over-priced platform with an hoard of invalid/fake clicks, so I assume this would make the Adwords platform less appealing if they increase your click price because the landing page contains affiliate or other PPC ads.

November 12, 2006

Luke

I pulled conversion tracking off my sites about 7 months ago.

Google wants to know everything about you and then they use it to raise prices- why give it to them.

You think if they find out you’re paying $1 per click to sell a $2000 product they’ll let that slide?

IMO this move is to soften people up for CPA- the totally invasive and final Google “slap” that will require advertisers to open their books totally to the Goog.

November 12, 2006

Ituloy Angsulong

Thanks for the info shoe…

November 12, 2006

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November 13, 2006

James

In response to Google’s new landing page split testing tool.

Once again Google is providing tools that allow them to collect as much private company data from you as possible and close the customer loop.

So with you and thousands of your competitors providing this free market data from advertising to sale, the loop is now closed, allowing Google to make arbitrary judgements on bid prices based upon the FREE and PRIVATE information you have provided.

One can argue that the market will determine Adwords bid prices however we already know that with Google’s landing page quality update this is simply not true. Bid prices escalated dramatically for advertisers that were deemed unsatisfactory by Google’s standards.

I would be very wary about providing so much private internal marketing data to a company that is charging you for advertising. As marketers we should know that providing your most intimate details for that “t-shirt” is simply not good business.

November 13, 2006

Jon

Good post Jeremy. Also saw this coming for a while now. Arbitrage in general will still make webmasters millions a year (combined, not per webmaster), but now it will make the really lazy ones wisen up and do some real work. It’s not even all that much work, but it’s truly amazing to see how people can be so lazy when the chance to make so much goddamn cash is right in front of their faces, and all they have to do is be a little creative and spend a tad more time with their links. I’ll bet we’ll see lots of people all over the different forums bitching about this and how they never saw it coming either. Fools!

ShoeMoney

marcel

ShoeMoney

actually I think using these services is a bad idea since they use a 301 redirect. Might as well be the regular link.

November 22, 2006

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November 24, 2006

Jerry

this whole page is funny…

if there weren’t so many people creating sites with no content, and only adsense ads (so called mfa sites). using adwords to cheat people into going to their sites, so they can try and get rich quick for doing nothing isntead of getting fof their butts and finding a real job, none of this would even be a discussion.

I personally know alot of people who use adwords to get trraffic to their sites, that dont display any ads at all. I also know people who use adsense for sites where they sell products. they are real sites, with real content, and a real purpose other than cheating people out of their money.

As a publisher, i’m rather lucky with adsense.. I display the ads on pages with certain keywords and cotnent, and use the filter to block ‘mfa’ sites and sites that have nothing but links and no content (and no real purpose for those who visit them)

I strongly back google on it’s quality bot for adwords subscribers, and having a human in the mix to make sure the system doesn’t confuse mfa sites with real sites. It may not be a perfect system, but it’s a start, and shows google is aware of the people who are trying to take advantage of it all.

If you really want to make money from google adsense, and benefit from adwords advertising, make a real site, with quality content. Put some of the thought and energy being ut into making a nothing site to cheat the system into something people will want to visit, isntead of tricking them into it.

sh33p

What’s a good cloaking script? I use ccount, but don’t like the idea of a flat text database.

December 2, 2006

fthead9

In the past search engines have had trouble executing javascript. If CJ is still worth using, based on your recent post a big if, then would using their javascript URLs be a quick and simple way around having too many outbound affiliate links?

December 4, 2006

Slapnuts

Adbrite is looking better and better everyday.

December 5, 2006

leslie

I’m new to this adwords and affiliate stuff. I set up an ad. Everything worked well. When I logged back in, my keywords jumped to $10! This may sound like a stupid question, but hopefully you will see me ignorant of the terminology and how the internet works. My question is: Does the dramatic increase of my cost of keywords have anything to do with the arbitrage and adsense stuff you are talking about? The site I am affiliated to does not have any ads.
I’m trying to make adwords work, but I’m failing miserably. My husband is ready to strangle me because I keep trying, but if everyone else is making money, then I can too.

December 19, 2006

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